15 July 2014

Review: Body on the Wall by Michelle Wing

"Body on the Wall," the title poem, appears in the
potent second section (called "Fire") of this four-part book, each
part named for one of the elements. "Body on the Wall" gives readers
a strong taste of violence in an intimate relationship. The narrator's partner
has taken an anger management class, and has the certificate to prove it, but
the poet knows only too well he––

can con anyone:

Police. Lawyers. Landlords. Me.

It is my body on the wall, bruised and battered

and nobody, nobody, can say they don't see

Undone, she takes the anger management certificate, smears her own
blood on it and tacks it to her black dress, the one she has shredded with a
blade to tell what he was like, so nobody can say they don't see. In
"Refocus," Wing, who is known in the non-literary world for her work
with victims of domestic violence, writes as a compassionate observer: A
woman comes into a women's shelter, her "face purpled with blows,"
but though she has been here before, she refuses to press charges or leave her
abuser. Even those who succeed in escaping, Wing implies, may be haunted the
rest of their lives. The life of a woman who has left her abuser and moved on
is tellingly recorded in "Even a Woman":

[. . .] I was in hiding

one of the disappeared

new town

unlisted phone number, quit the job

I used to have cause I could not afford

to leave a trace. I had shrunk again

into that victim role, the one abandoned

so long ago.

As a feminist claiming her power, Wing is sensitive to the power
dynamics at play among women, too. Having "learned love translated through
the words of men," having had her "debut" as a lover with men,
Wing is aware that with her lesbian lover she is now "the one who holds /
the one who touches" ("Body of a Woman, Cuerpo de
Mujer").

Trauma and concerns with abuse tend to have origins in early
family life, and it is not surprising, perhaps, that Wing chooses to focus
attention on her upper middle class background. Her devoted, philanthropic
family was "perfect"--except of course when it wasn't. Her mother, a
super mom who adopted orphans from other cultures, often flew into
uncontrollable rages. The Vietnamese child of war from the 1970s who became a part
of this family appears movingly in Wing's poems. More unsettling, are memories
of a childhood molestation that ends with a suicide attempt
("Breathing").

Wing's work is strongest in this dark mode. She is a poet of
advocacy for the downtrodden, the grieving. In the poem
"Anthropomorphism," Wing is unswayed by political or social
correctness, and follows her own instincts. Why not by anthropomorphic, she
asks, when you see a doe seeming to grieve over the body of her spotted fawn?

When she turns to praise in the section called “Wind," the
poet seems at times to lose her ground. In "How to Free a Poem" Wing
writes, "winnow some words, toss them in the air," but sometimes
becomes a bit too buoyant for my taste, as in her ode to the French
philosopher-novelist-poet Helene Cixous: "I hunger for her / I want to
lick each word / put my tongue on the nouns / take the nipple of her poetry
between my teeth /and bite."

This is not to say Wing's work lacks humor. That she can succeed
in a lighter vein is evident in "Ode to a Laundry Basket":

And there you were,

a classic, a Penelope, graceful

in your woven seagrass over a steel frame.

With allure enough to attract

a thousand lovers,

yet the steadfastness to wait

for the one who is coming home.

Zara Raab is a poet and literary journalist who work appears widely in
small magazines. She is the author of four books, including Swimming
the Eel and Rumpelstiltskin, finalist for the Dana Award.
She is a contributing editor to The Redwood Coast Review. Visit her
at www.zararaab.com